Unmasqued by Colette Gale

Unmasqued by Colette Gale

 

I found this book while browsing

Amazon.com's Bargain Books.

 

I'm not so much a fan of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, but I love both the movie and the musical so much that they more than make up for the book.

 

I was intrigued by this book firstly because it was a retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, and then I became more intrigued by the fact that it was erotica, and then finally, the controversial Amazon.com reviews convinced me that I had to buy this book. Along with Colette Gale's other erotic novel of The Count of Monte Cristo (of which I hated the movie but loved the book).

 

This is the first erotica I've ever read and although I blush to say so, I really enjoyed it. There are considerably more sex scenes and details in those scenes than in your regular trashy romance novels, but in Unmasqued I felt that they served the story well.

 

I never felt that the sex scenes were forced or added for the sake of it, although sometimes I did feel like it was a little too much information. But in fact, most of the scenes and the characters' actions and reactions in them only served to help us see the (sick natures of the) characters' personalities more clearly.

 

I felt also that it made sense that the characters were having sex, and a lot of it, as it's set in a theater in France in those days when actresses and singers weren't really looked upon respectably, and were more likely to be someone's mistress than not. I felt as if I was reading something out of Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White or some other similar book.

 

Sex scenes aside though, I loved, loved, loved the book! I loved how Gale stayed true to the original story's plot, yet twisting it and allowing us to see it from a new light from a whole new different perspective. The poor Phantom has always been portrayed as the bad guy and Raoul the hero, but what if things were what they seemed?

 

It's really not so different in real life after all, is it? There are two sides to every story, and most times depending on who tells the story, the hero and the bad guy are interchangeable. I've always had the hots for the Phantom, and Colette Gale's Unmasqued has made me fall more in love with him. I love her version of the story, and although there are many who would disagree with me, to me, this will always be the 'true' story of The Phantom of the Opera.